Flaubert's Madame

I was recently pointed back to Flaubert's Madame Bovary by a bit of a circuitous route. In preparation for writing a review of Julian Barnes' new book Nothing to be Frightened of (the review will appear in the summer issue of the Harvard Divinity Bulletin), I spent some time in Barnes' "novels," including A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters and Flaubert's Parrot, both of which are fantastic forays in history and biography, contesting our tidy self-assured distinctions between history and the novel. (This relationship and distinction is brought to the fore in what I'm reading right now: the novelist Shelby Foote's monumental The Civil War: A Narrative--but more on that some other time.) Flaubert and his generation are at the center of Flaubert's Parrot, but they also persistently appear as sages of a sort in Nothing to be Frightened Of. Thus I was pointed back to Flaubert's classic (particularly Geoffrey Wall's translation for the Penguin Classics).

The subtitle of Madame Bovary is a signal to us: it promises to narrate Provincial Lives. One might say that Madame Bovary is the first "suburban" novel--opening and anticipating a literary line that peeks into the mundane lives of the petit bourgeois, a line that will eventually give us films like Magnolia and Little Miss Sunshine. "Provincial" in a French context, of course, simply means "not Paris," though the Rouen region of France was perhaps particularly "provincial" in this respect. And yet, Madame Bovary is not the cynical work of a snooty Parisian taking shots at benighted provincials. There is a certain way in which the novel's subject almost hallows provincial life, I'd say: it decides that it's worth looking behind the doors of a village pharmacist and tracking the life of a despondent housewife. No one could read the heart-rending closing scenes of the novel--where Flaubert's stylistic flourish is most evidenced--and conclude that the author despises "provincial lives." (In this respect it calls to mind what is still perhaps the most important novel I've ever read, Jean Girardoux's Choice of the Elect.) If I ever become a writer, this hallowing of the domestic will be my literary mission.

Of course, Madame Bovary is not famous for her domesticity! However, given the scandal of the novels sexuality upon appearance, the contemporary reader will be (pleasantly) surprised at how oblique the eroticism is here (cp. Stanley Fish's recent comments on "the two most erotic moments" in American cinema). Indeed, the explicitness of Madame Bovary will look tame to anyone who just watches the Disney channel.

But most significant about the novel is the way that Flaubert bores into his characters, stopping the camera, so to speak, and letting it hang on their interiority in ways I find quintessentially French. While there is a plot driving the story, we find ourselves reading as explorers of an internal geography. Flaubert is a kind of cartographer, mapping the psyche. And he does all of this in a style that is unmatched--not particularly baroque or flowery, but still in a way that seems to sing. He pauses at just the right moments and describes what is etched on a face or the movement of a hand. Sometimes, as in the closing scenes, this is done with a pace that is breathtaking without being hasty or impatient. Consider just one snippet, quite at random:

But as she was writing, she beheld a different man, a phantom put together from her most ardent memories, her favourite books, her most powerful longings; and by the end he became so real, so tangible, that her heart was racing with the wonder of it, though she was unable to imagine him distinctly, for he faded, like a god, into the abundance of his attributes. He lived in the big blue country where silken rope-ladders swing from balconies, scented by flowers and lit by the moon (p. 271).

It is a small irony that a story which narrates the disastrous frustrations of pleasure-seeking is couched in a style that makes reading sheer pleasure.

Revisiting the '68 Conventions

As historical animals, we seem to have a curious blindspot: about a decade that precedes and then includes our birth. When we are young, this time has not sufficiently settled into the past to count as "history," and thus doesn't show up in our history textbooks. It is also an era that has been lived, shared and thus assumed by the adults around us; they needn't talk about it because they've all been there.

For me this blindspot has been particularly disappointing and frustrating because it means "the sixties"--an era that hovers in our collective consciousness as either a past nirvana or the time when hell's handbasket showed up on our doorsteps--has always been just out of reach, a fuzzy apparition that I've never quite been able to grasp. Having been born in 1970, I have no personal memories of the tumultuous and frenetic shape of the sixties and early seventies: the assassinations of JFK, MLK, and RFK; the civil rights movement and urban riots; the moon landing; Vietnam; the Kent State shootings; Watergate; and so much more. (Being born and raised in Canada is also a factor here.)

If there was a year I could live in that decade, I think it would be 1968. As an academic, and particularly as a philosopher specializing in French philosophy, '68 has always loomed over the figures I study--which includes the soixante-huitards who barricaded the Sorbonne. But given that such time travel is not likely any time soon, I was at least encouraged by the NYRB's republication of Norman Mailer's account of the 1968 presidential nomination conventions in Miami and the Siege of Chicago. Sensing, I guess, that the 2008 conventions will be "historic" (I don't quite share that sentiment, but I understand where it's coming from), the reissuing of this classic actually shows how gutted and disappointing the nomination process has become.

Mailer brings his flair and cadence as a novelist to this "new journalism" account of the conventions (the Republicans in Miami, the Democrats [in]famously in Chicago) originally written for Harper's. Punctuated by rapid-fire brilliance and mad, dazzling metaphors, the book reads like a dispatch by beat poets. And Mailer inserts himself into the story (hence the "new journalism") but not intrusively. This is never about Norman Mailer; rather, the anxieties and hopes of "the reporter" (always in the third person) are simply taken to be portals that intersect with his quarry.

Mailer brings this period to life in ways that had me astounded--partly because of my ignorance of just what happened in Chicago that August, and partly because of Mailer's character studies of figures like Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, even Richard Nixon. Indeed, what is perhaps most surprising from Mailer is his generosity, which functions as a kind of objectivity that prevents his "new journalism" from just sliding into propaganda. Indeed, the Maureen Dowds and Michael Moores of the world would do well to read this and see how Mailer--who ceretainly didn't lack commitments--could even be fair to Nixon (Nixon!). "In 1962 the reporter had given a small celebration for the collapse of Richard Nixon after his defeat in the election for Governor of California," Mailer confessess. "Now, in 1968, he was on the edge of becoming the nominee. It was obvious something was wrong with the reporter's picture. In his previous conception of Richard Nixon's character there had been no room for a comeback" (p. 42).

Mailer's descriptions are wry and incisive. His account of the Republican convention is concerned with the plight and fate of the WASP, observing "the muted tragedy of the Wasp--they were not on earth to enjoy or even perhaps to love so very much, they were here to serve, and serve they had in public functions and public charities...--and so much of America did not wish them to serve any longer" (35). This might explain why "you could not picture a Gala Republican who was not clean-shaven by eight A.M." Hence the irony "that in a year when the Republic hovered on the edge of revolution, nihilism, and lines of police on file to the horizon, visions of future Vietnams in our own cities upon us, the party of conservatism and principle, of corporate wealth and personal frugality, the party of cleanliness, hygiene, and balanced budget [!], should have set itself down on a sultan's strip" in Miami (14). (Brings to mind the complete lack of intuition when the Democrats recently organized a conference on faith and politics--in Las Vegas!)

At times Mailer's descriptions border on reverie, like his closing reflections on cops and the police mentality, or his early riff on the religion of "Americanism":

So far as there was an American faith, a belief, a mystique that America was more than the sum of its constituencies, its trillions of dollars and billions of acres, its constellation of factories, empyrean of communications, mountain transcendent of finance, and heroic of sport, transports of medicine, hygiene, and church, so long as belief persisted that America, finally more than all this, was the world's ultimate reserve of rectitude, final garden of the Lord, so far as this mystique could survive in every American family of Christian substance, so then were the people entering this [Republican] Gala willy-nilly leaders of this faith, never articulated by any of them except in the most absurd and taste-curdling jargons of partriotism mixed with religion, but the faith existed in the crossroads between the psyche and the heart where love, hate, the cognition of grace, the all but lost sense of the root, and adoration of America congregate for some" (33-34).

Most harrowing, as you'd expect, is the first hand account of the violence and police brutality in Mayor Daley's Democratic Chicago. ("Daley," Mailer comments, "was not a national politician, but a clansman--he could get 73% of the vote in any constituency made up of people whose ancestors were at home with rude instruments in Polish forests, Ukrainian marshes, Irish bogs--they knew how to defend the home: so did he" [104].) This, I'm embarrassed to say, was all news to me. Here is Hubert Humphrey and Gene McCarthy, with Mayor Daley's army and Bobby Kennedy's ghost both looming over the Amphitheatre. Here we run into Alan Ginsberg and Jean Genet making their way to Grant Park, camped out with the Yippies across from the Hilton. Mailer's account of Chicago, "the last of the great American cities," includes a stark account of the stockyards and slaughterhouses that would be the milieu of the Democratic convention. I can't do justice to it here and simply counsel reading the book; it broke open this fuzzy area of my historical blindspot.

Perhaps most surprising, given what I knew of Mailer, is his honesty and self-knowledge, his almost confessional mode--wrestling with his own cowardice, racism, frustrations. One can feel the divided conscience of the now middle-aged Mailer who owns up to a "conservative" fear that he might lose the America he knew--"that insane warmongering technology land with its smog, its superhighways, its experts and its profound dishonesty" (186-187). And yet...

Yet, it had allowed him to write--it had even not deprived him entirely of honors, certainly not of an income. He had lived well enough to have six children, a house on the water, a good apartment, good meals, good booze, he had even come to enjoy wine. A revolutionary with taste in wine has come already half the distance from Marx to Burke (187).

This sort of honesty seems to be lacking from those who consider themselves the heirs of new journalism. Mailer fesses up to feeling caught: "To be forty-five years old, and have lost a sense of where his loyalties belonged--to the revolution or to the stability of the country" (188).

American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia

I think I'm pretty clearly out of the closet now as at least a conservative sympathizer--so long as "conservative" refers to the dispositions of Burke et. al. and not the neoliberalism and libertarianism that currently marches under the banner of "conservative." Really, how could any enthusiastic Americanism, founded in revolution, ever be "conservative?" That tiny little problem notwithstanding, I've been spending the last couple of days dipping into American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia. (It's publication garnered quite a bit of attention, including a review in the New York Times.)

I should admit that if I'm a journal junkie, I also have a soft spot for encyclopedias of this sort. They still represent for me veritable educations in themselves, so I love wending through them, dipping in at a whim, then following the cross-referencing to pursue a thread. For instance, I followed a thread that began with an entry on Cleanth Brooks, which then took me to an entry on New Criticism, to ones on Donald Davidson and Allen Tate, pointing me to Southern Agrarians and The Sewanee Review. Another foray began with the entry on Eugene McCarthy (who emerges as a fascinating character in Norman Mailer's Miami and the Siege of Chicago), which then pointed me to an entry on Hilaire Belloc, landing in the entry on distributism (which I think I just might be).

The encyclopedia does a pretty decent job of exhibiting that "conservatism" in America is a contested philosophy. While all the luminaries of neoconservatism receive praise, other strains of American conservatism that contest this vision also receive coverage. So, for instance, Jeremy Beer 's entry on Schindler, David L. notes how Schindler's ecclesially-centered conservatism (for which I have great sympathy) is a trenchant critique of the "John Courtney Murray project" of assimilation carried out by supposed "conservatives" like Richard John Neuhaus, Michael Novak, and George Weigel (all of whom get their own entries, too). Or the constellation of entries related to the Southern Agrarians (including entries on Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and I'll Take My Stand) sketches a kind of conservatism opposed to the nationalism (not to mention "big government") that now passes for conservatism in federal politics.

Admittedly, there are pieces of the encyclopedia which are incestuous, hagiographic, and bordering almost on the ridiculous. (In the last category I point to Robert Sirico's entry on liberation theology, which is pretty much like asking Jeff Sharlet to write the entry for Ted Haggard in something like the InterVarsity Encyclopedia of Evangelical Saints.) But these weaknesses aside, this will be a book I keep on my desk, and close to my reading chair, as a mini-education in a movement.

Madapple: A Taste of Science and Religion

A few months back I was intrigued by a booknote in Vanity Fair about Christine Meldrum's first novel, Madapple (published by Knopf--not a bad way to start!). It piqued my interest because the note indicated that the story--aimed at a young adult market--intertwined issues of science and religion. This past week I finally had a chance to read the book, which was entertaining, intriuging, a bit maddening, and in the end, only slightly disappointing.

The story is certainly not the usual fare, eluding the categories of science fiction, fantasy, and mystery, while dabbling in all three. Set in rural and smalltown Maine, the narrative revolves around a girl named Auslag who is part of an immigrant family from Denmark. The story also plays with time, starting in 1987, but then regularly transporting us to a courtroom in 2007, to dip back to events in 2003 and 2006. In some ways, Meldrum is at her best in the courtroom scenes (she's a trained lawyer), and the regular visits to this setting help make for chapters that come in short bursts--no doubt welcome by many young readers (and not a few older ones). The other "device" that Meldrum uses to weave the story is a persistent thread of botany. The life of Auslag and her mother revolves around a dizzying array of plants and flowers found in the the region (including "madapple"). At times this felt like an MFA gimmick, but it works and rarely feels forced. It not only moves the story forward and helps it to hang together, it is also an important means by which nature and science make themselves felt in the story--though "science" isn't the only way to respond to the "nature" that is plantlife.

And that, it seems, is at the heart of Meldrum's interest: if science and religion are at play in the story, they are on the stage as alternative explanations of phenomena. If Madapple deals with issues of science and religion, it's because the book is more fundamentally dealing with what Paul Ricoeur described as "the conflict of interpretations." Phenomena press upon us, nature pushes back against us, and we are pushed to render explanations, interpretations, and construals of what's happening. For instance, a strange and "unexplained" pregnancy can be variously described as a virgin birth or a rape. Meldrum tackles the conflict of interpretations at various levels throughout the story, and persistently offers episodes of religion and science as competing explanations--but also a couple of hints that they might be complementary explanations of the same phenomenon. On top of this, she is weaving a story that has just enough mystery and intrigue to keep you turning the pages (though a couple of things were telegraphed a bit too much). My disappointment stemmed from two trends in the book: First, methinks Meldrum caught a bit of the Dan-Brown-syndrome, displaying a sophomoric fascination with Gnosticism, the Essenes, and the Gospel of Thomas that is meant to shock and scandalize. (It was also weird to read a novel with a bibliography--what is that saying?) Second, I don't think Meldrum let's the conflict of interpretations persist. The novel shrink back from letting the conflict go "all the way down," so to speak (I won't hint in which direction in tips so as not to ruin the story of you); there could have been resolution to the story without bringing definitive resolution to the conflict of interpretations.

Those concerns aside, it's a great summer read, easy enough for the beach, and something you can pass along to your teenager--as I just did.

Beware of Books! From Walker Percy

I'm working in a few snippets from Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins into the book I'm trying to finish (called Desiring the Kingdom). But I couldn't find a good excuse to work in this quote, so thought I'd pass it on here, from the mind the protagonist, Dr. Tom More:

Books matter. My poor wife, Doris, was ruined by books, by books and a heathen Englishman, not by dirty books but by clean books, not by depraved books but by spiritual books. God, if you recall, did not warn his people against dirty books. He warned them against high places. My wife, who began life as a cheerful Episcopalian from Virginia, became a priestess of the high places. I loved her dearly and loved to lie with her and would and did whene'er she would allow it, but most especially in the morning, at breakfast, in the nine o'clock sunlight out here on the "enclosed patio." But books ruined her. Beware of Episcopal women who take up with Ayn Rand and the Buddha and Dr. Rhine formerly of Duke University. A certain type of Episcopal girl has a weakness that comes on them just past youth, just as sure as Italian girls get fat. They fall prey to Gnostic pride, commence buying antiques, and develop a yearning for esoteric doctrine (p. 64).

Vidal's Prescience

A couple of weeks ago a long-anticipated book arrived at my office: The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal (Doubleday, 2008), edited by Jay Parini (also Vidal's biographer). It provides an excellent selection of Vidal's criticism and essays from 1953-2004. Unfortunately, having lately seen and read interviews with the aged Vidal, I'm afraid that he's becoming a bit predictable, regularly harping on the Bush regime, which seems like too easy a target and doesn't yield much creativity from Vidal's sharp mind.

However, most of these essays represent Vidal at his best: a participant in the nation's history who, with just a slightly haughty air, offers an incisive take on what's going on because of a keen sense of what's happened in the past (chronicled so well in his historical fiction). He refuses any distinction between "high" and "low" culture; all is fair game. Consider, for instance, the hilarious (but deadly serious) account of the "The Top Ten Best-Sellers According to the Sunday New York Times as of January 7, 1973," in which Vidal explores the Koontzes and Graftons of his day (concluding that, in fact, here was the first generation of novelists raised on television). There is a wonderful recollection of Edmund Wilson, as well as an iconoclastic and irreverent essay on "The Holy Family," the Kennedys, in which Vidal predicts a dynasty--in 1967, just months before RFK's assassination.

And reading these essays now, in some cases 50 years later, one has to be struck by Vidal's prescience. For just one example, I would point to some closing reflections in a long essay on Egypt under Nasser, published in Esquire in 1963:

We [Americans] truly believe that we never wanted a world empire simply because we don't suffer from a desire to see Old Glory waving over the parliaments of enslaved nations. But we do want to make a buck. We do want to maintain our standard of living. For good or ill, we have no other true national purpose. [...] Our materialistic ethos is made quite plain in the phrase 'the American way of life.'

I submit that our lack of commitment to any great mystique of national destiny is the healthiest thing about us and the reason for our current success. We are simple materialists, not bent on setting fire to the earth as a matter of holy prinicple, unlike the True Believers with their fierce Either-Ors, their Red or Dead absolutes, when the truth is that the world need be neither, just comfortably pink and lively. Even aid to such a disagreeable and unreliable nation as Nasser's Egypt increases our sphere of influence, expands our markets, maintains our worldly empire. And we are an empire.

While neoconservatism is defined precisely by its invention of and commitment to something like a "mystique" that Vidal cautions against, the pragmatism of the American empire remains solidly in place. And hence Vidal's closing warning is also prescient:

Ultimately, our danger comes not from the idea of Communism, which (as an Archbishop of Canterbury remarked) is a "Christian heresy" whose materialistic aims (as opposed to means) vary little from our own; rather, it will come from the increasing wealth and skill of other Serene Republics which, taking advantage of our increasing moral and intellectual fateness, will try to seize our markets in the world. If we are to end, it will not be with a Bomb but a bigger Buck.

What Vidal's prescience perhaps did not see is that such a displacing Republic would not be quite Serene, but Red.

Books, Materiality, and Beauty

This is a bit spooky: just this morning, as I was waiting to head out for an appointment, I picked up a brand new volume sitting on my nightstand: a collection of Edmund Wilson's criticism just published in the the Library of America. And to be perfectly honest, I didn't pick it up to read it; I picked it up just to hold it, to caress it. I don't know if you've ever held a LoA volume, but they are pretty much the most sumptuous books one could hope for from an American publisher. They are thick and squat, with Bible-like pages and exquisite bindings, as well as a classic font. There is a weight to the books that is just a pleasure to hold and handle. Most of my library is very pragmatic (i.e., driven by a concern for building content on a budget, and thus populated by alot of Penguin classics paperbacks and such); but every once in a while, when I get a gift certificate, I splurge and also indulge in purchases that reflect the book as object.

How funny, then, to just read John Lancaster's reflections on the same phenomena, with the very same book, in this week's London Review of Books. Wilson, of course, would have taken a certain delight in such fetishization of his work!

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

A couple of weeks ago I had a brief wait in the Birmingham train station, waiting to catch a train back to York. Somehow I found myself in the bookstore (imagine that!) and picked up a book I'd heard a bit about: Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which was nominated for the Man Booker Prize (akin to the American Pulitzer). After perusing the blurbs, I opened to the first page which opens thus:

"Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America. I noticed that you were looking for something; more than looking, in fact you seemed to be on a mission, and since I am both a native of this city and a speaker of your own language, I thought I might offer you my services."

Perhaps it was the use of the second person; perhaps it was because I somehow heard this in accent; perhaps it was because of the tension embedded in just these few lines; but in any case, I was hooked. Though I stacks of papers to grade on the train ride home, I bought the book and consumed it, finishing it just as the trained rolled into York station.

The book is set in a timeline that spans pre- and post-9/11 context; the event itself makes only a minimal cameo, though its ripple effects drive the later action of the narrative (tensions between India and Pakistan are much more significant). The novel tracks the "formation," one might say, of a young Pakistani, Changez, by some of America's most powerful institutions, including Princeton, Wall Street, and New York in general. (Of the difference between Princeton and New York, the narrator notes: "I was, in four and a half years, never an American; I was immediately a New Yorker.")

But the story also documents how his personal version of the American dream begins to unravel, because of 9/11, because of a surprising--even unwanted--new sense of allegiance to his homeland, because of a girlfriend who seems to have all one could dream of but who, in fact, suffers a private nightmare.

Hamid's command of the very difficult second-person approach is stunning, allowing him to play with time and ambiguities in quite captivating ways--including a delightfully maddening conclusion. And the story moves quickly while also developing characters: sort of breezy, but with real substance that sticks with you long after you're done the book. In short, a great read for a train ride.

Teaching as a Postal Vocation

George Steiner's latest book, My Unwritten Books, has been getting a lot of press, mainly for the racy chapter on his sexual escapades in which he considers how different languages condition erotic experience (he takes this well beyond the old joke about sex in German). Indeed, critics seem rather fixated on this chapter--from the first review I read, I wouldn't have guessed that the book also includes some stellar criticism! But perhaps my favorite snippet comes from a conversation with him in The Guardian in which he captures the exciting opportunity that is teaching:

"unless you are absolutely first rate, which so few of us are, then what I call the letter-carrier function of the teacher is wonderful. To serve great works, to send the letters out hoping they get to a good mailbox, is a marvellous thing."

Academics are notoriously given to frequent fits of self-importance and illusions of grandeur. But every once in a while, we get a clear, humble, maybe maganimous glimpse of who we are and will be, and then find a special joy and delight in being teachers. Would that I could always be content to be a mailman.

Resurrecting the Green Knight

My romance with medievalism makes me a sucker for anything Arthurian. What a treat, then, to be part of the generation that gets to enjoy Simon Armitage's new translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one of the most beloved epic poems in the orbit of the Arthurian tales. Armitage was particularly concerned to recover something often ignored by other translators: the importance of alliteration in the original. With that as a central goal, Armitage has produced a version that sings, even though it also conveys the grittiness and earthiness of the poetry (think Ted Hughes). This is poetry where guttural syllables matter. (I tried to read it with a kind of northern brogue in my head--but probably it's best read out loud. I'm going to try to convince the kids of that!) Aside from a fascinating story of honor, chivalry, and the Green Knight's rather pig-headed lack of prudence, there is also the titillating undercurrent of a certain eroticism in the story that is alluded to with a wink and a grin. A delightful experience that repays many re-readings.

Poetry Month with Knopf

It's Poetry Month again, and as has been my custom, I encourage folks to sign-up for Knopf's wonderful Poem-a-Day program. Consider, for instance, today's treat from Edward Hirsch:


Self Portrait

I lived between my heart and my head,
like a married couple who can't get along.

I lived between my left arm, which is swift
and sinister, and my right, which is righteous.

I lived between a laugh and a scowl,
and voted against myself, a two-party system.

My left leg dawdled or danced along,
my right cleaved to the straight and narrow.

My left shoulder was like a stripper on vacation,
my right stood upright as a Roman soldier.

Let's just say that my left side was the organ
donor and leave my private parts alone,

but as for my eyes, which are two shades
of brown, well, Dionysus, meet Apollo.

Look at Eve raising her left eyebrow
while Adam puts his right foot down.

No one expected it to survive,
but divorce seemed out of the question.

I suppose my left hand and my right hand
will be clasped over my chest in the coffin

and I'll be reconciled at last,
I'll be whole again.

Gary Wills' Venice

Tomorrow I make my first pilgrimage to Venice, the enchanted city that so charmed Ruskin, though his Stones of Venice narrates both what he takes to be its genius and its demise--which correlates with its Gothic beginning and Renaissance decadence. For Ruskin's Venice, the renaissance was as hardly a re-birth, but more of a death knell. So, as a devotee of Ruskin, you can imagine that I've been boning up on Stones (from a great 1898 edition in the York St. John's library in York).

However, I also took this as an opportunity to finally read a book that's been languishing on my shelf for a few years: Gary Wills' Venice, Lion City: The Religion of Empire (Simon & Schuster, 2001; paperback, 2002). I recall picking this up at a bookstore in Stratford several years ago, piqued by interest in Ruskin but with a sense that Wills' take represented the loyal opposition as it were. Turns out I was right.

It's a marvelous book, taking the reader on a tour of Venice's religious, commercial and political history through its rich artistic archive. (Wills opens with Evelyn Waugh's comment that "If every museum in the New World were emptied, if every famous building in the Old World were destroyed and only Venice saved, there would be enough to fill a lifetime with delight.") While the book does presume some prior knowledge of Venice (both history and art, as well as some sense of the geography of the city), it could also be profitably read alongside a decent guidebook for a first time visitor to Venice.

What's interesting is how Wills frames his "argument," as it were: First, though it was Ruskin who put him onto Venice, Wills is really out to contest Ruskin's moralistic thesis which suggested that Venice's empire crumbled precisely when commerce trumped religion. According to Wills, not only can the two not be separated, in fact, it was Venice's relentless pursuit of trade and commerce that already yielded all the earlier Gothic delights that Ruskin so valued.

This claim then floats on a second, more submerged interest: drawing persistent parallels with the "American" empire. Venice is celebrated as an empire of "independence," constantly resisting both Roman and Eastern hegemony--a kind of proto-protestant city on a hill devoted to labor, commerce, and trade. The analogy keeps bubbling up throughout the book--as when Lotto's depiction of the Annunciation brings to mind Jackie Kennedy (!): "I thought, when I first saw the picture in Washington, of Jacqueline Kennedy turning to clamber out of her car when the tremendous blow fell on her in the Dallas motorcade" (232-233). He brings the analogy home in an Epilogue, "Farewell to Empire," where he then labors to emphasize the differences between Venetian and American exceptionalism. While Venetians considered themselves exceptional, they didn't think that Venice could be replicated or exported, in contrast to American self-understanding which took itself as a pattern to be emulated and a system to be exported. In other words, Wills seems to draw the analogy in order to note that Venetian imperialism was pragmatic, commercial and "realist;" in short, Venetians weren't neoconservatives, had no PNAC-like idealism about a global Venice.

What's intriguing and prescient is the fact that this book was published on September 18, 2001 (and Wills didn't seem to make any changes for the 2002 paperback edition). He couldn't have known that the string of quotes from Wintrhop ("city set on a hill"), Jefferson (America as "the world's best hope"), and Lincoln would, within a year, be marshaled for just the kind of exceptionalist imperial project he was worried about here.

However, prescience is not quite wisdom. While the book is a spectacular tour of Venice via its art and architecture, and should be required reading for any thoughtful pilgrimage to Venice, I'm not convinced that Wills rightly diagnoses what's at stake in the "religion of empire."

Let me take just one example: What makes Venice the "Lion City" is the fact that it is home to the body of St. Mark, the Gospel writer signified by a lion. The relic of the saint--stolen from Alexandria by Venetian forces--played a central and crucial role in both the religious and political life of Venice from the time of its "translation" there in 828. The relic was presented to the doge (roughly, 'emperor') for protection. This is already an important episode: the saint's body was not delivered to the bishop, but to the doge--not to an ecclesiastical authority, but to a secular one. This already represented a marginalization of the bishop and--by extension--the pope and Rome (an early assertion of the "independence" of Venice that Wills so prizes). The doge becomes the protector of St. Mark's body in exchange for the saint's protection and prospering of the city. The Basilica of San Marco is the 'home' of this relic; but note, this is not a cathedral or a diocesan church--it is, in fact, the private chapel of the doge.

What does Wills conclude from this? That "Mark's body ordered the whole of society around itself" (33). Henceforth, "the republic would be true to him" (35).

But of course this is susceptible to exactly the opposite reading: that the "ordering" is just the other way around--that the republich has marshaled Mark's body as an instrument for its own ends, and that Mark's body is literally "brought in" (by theft) to baptize and sanctify the activity of the commercial empire.

Wills never seems to entertain this reading (even to disagree with it or dismiss it). As such, I think he underestimates his own phrase: "the religion of empire." These genitives are notoriously slippery. Wills seems to me "religion AND empire." This is why he thinks he can dismiss Ruskin's reading simply by noting that both piety and aggressive commercialism functioned simultaneously at the height of the Venetian empire. But that's seeing the two as distinct entities: Christian "religion" on the one side and commercial "empire" on the other. (Granted, I think Ruskin's reading fails on this point as well; he still works with too simple a dichotomy.)

But what if both are a matter of "religion?" What if it is precisely commerce that was the god of this empire? In short, what if it really might have been the case that the empire was the religion? (Wills seems to almost glimpse this when he notes that "[t]he doge, not the bishops, was the protector of religion in Venice, and when conflicts arose with Rome, the clergy were expected to be loyal to the Venetian faith" (45). Would it not be the case, then, that St. Mark was hijacked in the service of false gods?

And might this be a familiar story?

What I'm Listening To: More Josh Ritter

Josh Ritter has been keeping me company lately. (I was pretty bummed to learn that he'd be playing at Calvin in the semester that we're in England; but I just saw today that in April he's going to be playing in Leeds, just down the road from York! Sweet.)

In particular, I've been spending time with some of his earlier albums like Animal Years and Hello Starling. And I've been just mesmerized by "Bone of Song," a strange hymn to musical creation through the story of a relic that is also a muse. Unfortunately I can't find anywhere that the song is streamed, but if you can, do listen. The lyrics alone don't do it justice.

Bone of Song
just where it now lies I can no longer say
I found it on a cold and November day
in the roots of a sycamore tree where it had hid so long
in a box made out of myrtle lay the bone of song
the bone of song was a jawbone old and bruised
and worn out in the service of the muse
and along its sides and teeth were written words
I ran my palm along them and I heard

lucky are you who finds me in the wilderness
I am the only unquiet ghost that does not seek rest

the words on the bone of song were close and small
and though their tongues were dead I found I knew them all
in the hieroglyphs of quills and quatrain lines
Osiris—the fall of Troy—Auld Lang Syne
Kathleen Mauvoreen—Magnificat—Your Cheatin’ Heart
the chords of a covenant king singing 'fore the Ark
then I saw on a white space that was left
a blessing written older than the rest
it said

leave me here I care not for wealth or fame
I’ll remember your song – but I’ll forget your name

the words that I sang blew off like the leaves in the wind
and perched like birds in the branches before landing on the bone again
then the bone was quiet it said no more to me
so I wrapped it in the ribbons of a sycamore tree
and as night had come I turned around and headed home
with a lightness in my step and a song in my bones
lucky are you who finds me in the wilderness
I am the only unquiet ghost that does not seek rest

I just love the juxtaposition of the Mary's song and the Hank Williams classic, "Magnificat--Your Cheatin' Heart." It was for just such brokennes that Mary's son broke into the world--and occasioned a song. If Jesus is the Word, perhaps he's also the song whose lyrics are closer to "Your Cheatin' Heart" than the pop diddies that are regularly "Jesu-fied" to make them allegedly "Christian."

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian

While tackling some British classics, it's also fun to read what British folks are reading today. For a start, I just couldn't resist a book with this fabulous title: A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, by Marina Lewycka (a lecturer at Sheffield University, not far from York). A breezy, entertaining story of a quirky family set amidst the Ukrainian immigrant community of the British midlands. A long ways from the thick, literary depth of Ivanhoe but a fun book to curl up with for a couple nights.

The Age of Chivalry Revisited

One of the benefits of our sojourn here in York is that it means we're "unplugged" from some of the frantic pace that characterizes life back in the States, freeing us up for some dedicated time of reading. So one of my goals for this semester is to read a number of British classics that I've only dabbled in before. I've brought along Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, Cardinal Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, and others. But I dove into the pile by first reading Sir Walter Scott's 19th-century manifesto, Ivanhoe.

One of the courses I'm teaching here is "Victorian Britain and Postmodern Culture: Contemporary Medievalisms" (the informal title is "Everything Jamie loves about 19th-century Britain!"). As England was undergoing the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution--which, for all its "economic growth," also fragmented families and entire ways of life--the middle of the 19th century saw a backlash and critique in the form of a new fascination with medieval modes of life. Scott's Ivanhoe was a huge part of this. While penned as a story, it was adopted as a manifesto, calling England back from the atomism spawned by the "Satanic mills" of industry to the organic (and admittedly hierarchical) organization of the body politic in feudal times.

Scott's book (much of which is set right here in Yorkshire) embodies all the (often caricatured) pictures we've come to inherit: knights in shining armor, damsels in distress, tournaments and jousts, Richard the Lionheart and the despicable Prince John, characters hearkening to Robin Hood and Friar Tuck. But this is no mere lads' tale or entertainment. One has to be struck at the genuine literary quality of the book; this isn't some sort of proto-"genre fiction." And there are very interesting subplots and themes: One concerns the status of Jews in late medieval England, and here what appears to be Scott's traffic with typical anti-Semitic slurs is actually undercut, I think, by how Isaac and Rebekah function within the story. While anti-Semitic readers might have heard what they wanted to hear, on the other hand I think their attitudes are consistently undercut by Scott's narrative.

The other theme is historical and political, namely how "the English" came to emerge from the meld of Saxon and Norman--the indigenous English and the interloping French. King Richard and Ivanhoe's friendship marks the end of their animosity and the beginning of "the English."

An English treasure, penned by a Scot.

Top 10 Books in 2007: 1 & 2

[Sorry to have left 1 & 2 hanging; I was lost to preparations for packing for our move to York, then the transition here--which means I'm now away from my library, but I'll comment on these books from memory.]

1. The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy. This book has left an indelible mark on me, perhaps most of all because of the circumstances in which I read it. In February of 2007, our family endured a tragedy, the thought of which still brings me to tears: our niece, Sophie, just one year old, died very suddenly. We returned to Canada to be with my sister-in-law, her husband and their boys, and with the rest of the family. I was both honored and terrified when asked to co-officiate the funeral. But over the course of that horrific week, my wife and I, drawing on the prayers of friends at home, were able to keep ourselves together for the family to lean on. But when we got back to Grand Rapids, my world fell apart (it's still not quite back together). One of the most tangible effects of this sorrow was that I simply couldn't read. The world had become so dark and flat and empty that I couldn't muster the psychic energy to pick up a book or even a magazine--me!, who has books literally strewn across every room in the house! For almost two months I couldn't bring myself to crack open a book. Part of me just couldn't re-activiate my imagination, part of me felt like I didn't deserve the joy that comes with reading, part of me was too angry to even see straight, and part of me was scared what I might find.

One day while crawling into bed I glanced at the books stacked in my bedside shelf and spied this volume, which I once purchased in a used bookshop in Stratford. I can't say exactly what drew me to it, but I picked it up, clicked on the lamp, and couldn't put it down for hours. The book seemed to embody just the tension I was feeling inside: between Foote, the wry cynic and skeptic, and Percy, the existential Catholic (walking in the paths of both St. Thomas and Kierkegaard). The correspondence crackles with the love of a long friendship. Clearly Foote is the more faithful and fulsome correspondent, always the initiator of epistolary volleys, pestering Percy to reply or come visit--but it is a pestering that craves presence, craves Percy's friendship (Foote seemed to be lonely even when others were around). Foote especially pours himself into the letters so that they are themselves a kind of literature. It is also a fascinating peek behind the curtain of "the writer's life"--it's joys and ecstacies, its valleys and sorrows, its pet peeves and quirks. Over the course of the correspondence both Percy and Foote emerge to become the giants of American letters that we now know them as, but the letters provide an account that is decidedly un-romantic, and yet precisely because of that, engenders a certain romance about the bohemian life of "the writer."

This book did nothing short of recreating the world for me. It also convinced me that I want to be a "writer"--not just an author, but a real, live writer.

2. Cormac McCarthy, The Road. Recall that one of my criteria for "best" in this list is the ability of a book to continue to haunt me, keep me up at night, awake with me in the morning, and generally not let go of my imagination. McCarthy's widely praised book did that beyond any other this year. Like All the Pretty Horses, this story chronicles a paired relationship (I think three's a crowd for McCarthy) in ways that are as sparse as they are intimate. Dialogue rarely get beyond a few words each, and yet so much is said (and unsaid). I also found it a convicting book, on at least two levels: on the one hand, the father's love for his son is so patient and compassionate in the face of such dire scarcity and violence that I'm ashamed at my own impatience with my children in the face of safety and plenty. On the other hand, the father & son's world is pared down to such necessity that one becomes very conscious of our own embarrassment of riches (and our culture of waste). For weeks after reading this I couldn't even allow myself to ever say I was "hungry" (which usually means that I haven't had a full meal in the last 2 hours!). McCarthy quite intentionally invokes the language of mendicant friars in the book, calling to mind disciplines of simplicity and solidarity.

In fact, I think the book is suffused with ritual and thus a kind of sacramentality. Quasi-liturgies both make and hold together the remnants of a "world" for father and son. In fact, for the book I'm currently completing--Desiring the Kingdom: Liturgy, Learning and Formation--I'm using a passage from The Road as an epigraph:

The boy sat tottering. The man watched him that he not topple into the flames. He kicked holes in the sand for the boy’s hips and shoulders where he would sleep and he sat holding him while he tousled his hair before the fire to dry it. All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.

Top 10 Books in 2007: 3 and 4

3. Joseph Pearce, The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde (can be previewed at Google Books). Pearce's biography traces Wilde's "complicated" (to say the least) relationship to Christianity, and Roman Catholicism in particular. Noting that many of the French "decadent" authors the influenced Wilde (particularly Huysmans) later converted to Catholicism, Pearce discerns implicit longings throughout Wilde's corpus. Surprisingly (but not if one looks closely) he suggests that the supposedly scandalous Picture of Dorian Gray only "works" precisely because the decadence of the protagonist is implicitly criticized at every turn. It is hardly a celebration of immorality; rather, it is a morality tale in a classical tradition. I imagine that Wilde found himself wavering between two different Oxfords, or two different visions of the Renaissance that he learned at Oxford: one from Ruskin, the other from Pater. Pearce suggests that it was Ruskin's Renaissance that made the more longstanding impact.

4. It is perahps curious that in a year in which I read so much Joyce Carol Oates, I also had stacks of Graham Greene on my bedside table. The giant among them was certainly The End of the Affair. I can hardly begin to describe it because I find such a prospect so intimidating. Perhaps a couple of choice quotes might stand-in:

"I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil. I known so intimately that way that demon works in my imagination. [...] I can imagine that if there existed a God who loved, the devil would be driven to destroy even the weakest, the most faulty imitation of that love."

"Oh well," [the priest] said, "I'm not against a bit of superstition. It gives people the idea that this world's not everything." He scowled at me down his nose. "It could be the beginning of wisdom."

Top 10 Books in 2007: 5 and 6

5. Looking back, I read quite a bit of Joyce Carol Oates over the past year, including her novella The Corn Maiden: A Love Story (in Transgressions, ed. Ed McBain), short stories collected in High Lonesome: Selected Stories, 1966-2006, criticism in Uncensored: Views & Reviews, and one of her novels: You Must Remember This. JCO is a compelling storyteller whose writing extends an invitation into a world (worlds often set in upstate New York). But when one begins to map the Oatean world, one finds that it is a nihilistic world that is laced with violence (boxing appears constantly as a crystallization of this in her work, particularly in You Must Remember This). And I don't use "nihilistic" in an off-handed sense: I mean quite literally that Oates seems to not only see ubiquitious violence in the world; she inscribes it into its very structure--as the essential conditions of the world. (This, I've suggested before, might actually be where she differs from someone like Cormac McCarthy: while McCarthy's barren worlds are riddled with violence, I find in McCarthy a hint of hope that it might--that it could and ought--to be otherwise.) For instance, in You Must Remember This, Felix's violent and incestuous abuse of his niece Enid is the condition of possibility for her music, college success, yea her very sense of identity. I don't have the heart for such a Hegelian world.

However, the passge from the novel that sticks with me is a bit of a throw-away scene later in the story. Felix, the former boxing star and current town "player," poses a question to his brother, Lyle, a used furniture salesman eeking out an existence on the working side of town: "What's it like being a father?" Lyle, resisting his "first instinct" to "make a nervous joke," instead replied: "It depends. Sometimes it does seem to me I'm thinking about them constantly, obsessively, even when I'm not exactly aware of it." Recounting his worry over the children when they were younger, Lyle feels Felix's intense stare and concludes: "I suppose it's the crucial thing in my life. All Hannah and I have really done, you know? Because, well, what else is there...?"

I'm not sure if JCO is participating in a bourgeois mocking of this work-a-day vocation of raising a family, or whether she's giving voice to a sanctification of the ordinary. I found myself moved by Lyle's confession as a valorization of the "work" of domesticity, of family-making and child-rearing. It is perhaps especially poignant for those who have a kind of "public" life, whose professional work gets recognition and acclaim through other channels. But at the end of the day, I'm with Lyle: what more important work could there be? While I'm not at all inclined to the idolization of the family (as in a disordered "focus" on the nuclear family), I do think that the "domestic" work of family-formation trumps much of our "public" work. Indeed, in an era when the pursuit of self-interest translates into, at best, serial monogamy, there might be nothing more "counter-cultural" than the "work" of family. In fact Lyle's remark called to mind a centuries-old admonition to parents, Jacobus Koelman's 1679 The Duties of Parents, which he opens by reminding fathers and mothers that the vocation of parenting "is the most important duty God has put on your shoulders." So often the arts and literature see domesticity as a poison and threat to an "interesting" literary life; but right here in a "literary" novel we hear Lyle suggesting otherwise.

6. I continue to find myself going back to Charles Taylor's A Secular Age. This is a book that has dug a deep well that this generation and the next will continue to drink from.

Top 10 Books in 2007: 7 and 8

7. Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men. For the life of me, I can’t imagine how this book could possibly be a movie. Not because it isn’t a compelling story with all sorts of chilling thriller potential. And not because it isn’t populated with deep, fascinating, haunting characters (Chigurh is one of the most chilling characters I’ve run into in a while). The reason I can’t imagine this as a movie is because of McCarthy’s genius, namely his ability to paint such powerful pictures with such a simple palette and so few strokes. McCarthy’s prose is so frugal it borders on being stingy—and somehow (just how?!) he creates an engulfing world with two-bit dialogue and miserly description that says so much with so little.

The book also got me thinking: I think those who regale McCarthy for his “nihilism” (as I was wont to do a couple years ago) might be falling for a trap. I think we need to perhaps read McCarthy the way we ought to read Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray: we ought not confuse the author’s voice with that of the protagonist. So is it Chigurh who embodies Cormac McCarthy’s “worldview?” Or should we rather listen to the voice of Sheriff Bell?

Heading out into the chaotic moonscape that is Chigurh’s habitat (and creation, in a way), in an exchange with Molly, Sheriff Bell

pushed the chair back and rose and got down his gunbelt from the coatrack behind his desk and hung it over his shoulder and picked up his hat and put it on. What is it that Torbert says? About truth and justice?

We dedicate ourselves anew daily. Something like that.

I think I’m goin to commence dedicatin myself twice daily. It may come to three fore it’s over.

8. Edmund Wilson, Letters on Literature and Politics, 1912-1972. Wilson was one of the twentieth-century America’s great critics—from a time when criticism mattered (Norman Mailer, in a Paris Review interview, talks about his respect for critics like Wilson and Kazin), as well as a time when critics weren’t housed primarily in academia. Wilson and Kazin were part of a class of public intellectuals that has almost passed from the contemporary scene (Christopher Hitchens might be a bit of a throwback in this respect). I’m a correspondence junkie, so it’s easy for me to have a soft spot for a collection of letters from a sparkling figure like Wilson (who also was quite famous as a “character” in the literary scene; if the letters became a movie it would almost surely earn a ‘R’ rating). But letters like these also bring out my Luddite romanticism: it seems to me that the advent of email means we’ll never have books like this again. Our correspondence is too fleeting and flippant, too mechanical and utilitarian. No one will confuse our terse emails with the rich sorts of letters that Wilson and his circle used to swap. Wilson valued the letter (even the post card) as an outlet for literary flair and creation. Though he lacked any social filters and was only too willing to let his friends (like F. Scott Fitzgerald) know exactly what he thought of their work, one also finds here his appreciation for wise teachers and literary confreres.

Top 10 Books in 2007: 9 and 10

Caving in to the general media mania for “lists” as the year draws to a close, I’ve looked over my shelves and recalled the ten best books I’ve read in 2007. A couple of provisos should be made: (1) These are books I read in 2007, not necessarily books that were published in 2007 (in fact, I think only one of them appeared in the past year); (2) by “best” I simply mean books that were significant for me in some way. Usually this just means that they were books I kept thinking about, books that kept re-inserting themselves into my consciousness and imagination, perhaps books that changed my mind in some way.

So over the next week or so I’ll be posting some brief reflections, in reverse order (though the ranking shouldn’t be taken too seriously).

9. Russell Kirk, Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered. Since reading this book, I’ve continued to dive into Burke’s corpus (in fact, he will be an important part of the Studies in British Culture course I’m teaching in York, England next semester). As David Brooks has noted, Burke’s conservatism is precisely what has been forgotten by the neoconservatives that currently pass for the Right.

10. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (in the old Random House Faulkner Reader, which also includes his Nobel Prize address). This is one of those reads by which I keep trying to make up for my lack of a liberal arts education. Faulkner is often cited as an important influence, or at least background, of the “Southern Catholic” writers I appreciate (Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor), so I felt an obligation to dive into this rather intimidating book. You sort of have to let it wash over you. It requires the reader to be willing to be out of control, to feel lost, to trust the author that it’s going somewhere. At times I have to say it felt maddeningly obfuscating. But Faulkner also paints multiple words in a minimalism that brought to mind the sparse dialogue of Cormac McCarthy. In fact, I need to check about influences of Faulkner on McCarthy, since Faulkner also has an uncanny ability to let the third person narrator’s voice accommodate itself to shifting characters and locales, as well as an art for dialogue (including difficult dialects) that are true to the characters. Nothing short of a literary experience.